Inherit the Stars
by infiniteviking
Summary: On a camping trip gone wrong, Kirk demands to know what Spock sees in the sky.


The idea for this story blindsided me a while back when I was looking out the window late at night.

**Inherit the Stars**

"Tell me what it looks like," said Kirk.

Spock, as much to escape the persistent question as to answer it, rocked his head back and looked at the sky.

"Not unusual," he said at last. "Atmospheric interference with low light pollution... the proverbial midnight blue surrounding approximately 87 percent of the Milky Way's central mass. It's an exceptionally clear night."

"Not what I meant." Kirk grinned in the shifting firelight. "What do you see?"

"The winter constellations," said Spock, hardly needing to track the patterns that countless camping trips had impressed on his memory. "The Scorpion, Canis Major and Minor, Orion, Taurus and the Dippers, the Pleiades, the Twins--"

"Still not enough," said Kirk, and tried to laugh, but it came out as a wheezing cough. Spock risked a quick glance at McCoy, who had two fingers on the captain's wrist even as he studied his medical tricorder. _Redundant_, thought Spock, and McCoy shot him a look that said as plainly as speech: _Keep him talking_.

"Those appear to be shuttles," said Spock, indicating the horizon, where the distant, thundering freighters would never pick up the weak signal from their jury-rigged transponder. "And that one is a satellite."

Kirk watched the tiny gleaming pinprick until it vanished into the Earth's shadow.

"Only one satellite up there that means anything to me."

The_Enterprise_ was in geosynchronous orbit above San Francisco -- out in the public sector, where the skies swarmed with manmade lights. Completely invisible, of course, from this deep North Carolina forest, where the pristine heavens were considered a global treasure.

It wasn't fair.

"Keep looking," Kirk persisted, and Spock did, a part of him noting with detached interest the mazy tangle of branches surrounding them -- ash, pine, oak, maple. The forest swayed in the light breeze, its muted, jostling din mingling with a silence made of other sounds: water curling around stones in the creek, the hunting call of a distant owl, a few lonely insects that hadn't retired for the year. And Kirk's breath, which had stopped bubbling but was increasingly shallow.

McCoy propped his tricorder by Kirk's head. Spock shifted restlessly, and the doctor looked up, his expression softening.

"You're already doing it."

"I didn't say anything," retorted Spock, knowing full well that the question had been implicit.

"He's warm enough. I stopped the bleeding. It's up to him now." McCoy grinned wryly, glancing up at the empty sky. "'Course you could go hunting for volatile minerals and try to set off a primitive flare, but I'm not sure we're down to an act of desperation yet."

Humor, incongruity, memory. Spock smiled.

"You should do that more often," said Kirk, his own smile a white twist of pain. "Look again, Spock. You're telling me what they are. Tell me what you see."

The galaxy had slipped eastward, but nothing else had changed. Spock stared upward, letting the uneven pattern burn through the image of the body crumpled at the base of that unexpected ravine, his own voice catching now and then in the phantom crack of breaking bone.

"I see the leading edges of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants, and Romulan and Andorian space. Jupiter and its satellites, Saturn and its ring system, seven nebulas, fourteen galaxies, storm sectors, dark sectors, the suns of Vulcan and Orion--"

"Keep going. You're taking it too seriously."

"I see that your atmosphere and minor satellite grant these celestial bodies an apparent magnitude far greater than those of the equivalent size and distance as seen from Vulcan. The light pollution caused by T'Khut--"

"Close," whispered Kirk. "You're seeing them now. But that was there. This is here. What do they look like?"

Literary idiom crooked a ghostly finger. "The stars, like dust..."

"Asimov."

"The windows of night--"

"Tolkien. You can do better, Spock." Kirk's weak fingers clutched at his sleeve. "What do _you_ see?"

A fragment of absurdity -- the punchline of a lengthy and obscure joke that had puzzled him badly in the Academy -- surfaced in Spock's mind. He presented it gravely: a surreal counterpoint to the predicament at hand.

"That somebody stole our tents?"

McCoy sat back, gaped, and burst into half-hysterical laughter.

"I -- can't -- believe -- you just said that. Jim, did you hear that? Spock knows the tent joke!" He shook a finger at Spock. "I am _never_ gonna let you forget this. Not as long as I live."

"You tell him, Bones." Kirk's face was ghastly, his neck arched, seeking air, but his spirit was undimmed -- glad to be alive, glad to be with them, even with four smashed ribs and a punctured lung. He kept trying to raise his head, and McCoy, his own eyes blurring, gently held him down.

Stars danced and vanished as the branches swayed above them. Spock shook out his sleeve, straightened Kirk's shoulders to clear his airway, clutched his hands against the pain, offering what strength he could.

"You've got to see it, Spock." Kirk's light, familiar tenor, husked and breaking in the dry air, hitched as he tried to swallow. "Tell me you see it."

Spock saw stars. Swimming giddily in the atmosphere, roaring with spectral flares, thronging their small but significant region of infinity, blinding counterpoints to the fathomless sky. Kirk's childhood stars, the distant suns he'd stared at from his Iowa cornfields and vowed to walk among one day. Beauty, potency, benediction; the outstretched hands of the rest of the universe.

"I see," breathed Spock, and then flinched and threw up a palm to shield their eyes as the distinctive, swiftly descending beacons of a rescue shuttle broke over the trees and swallowed them in a field of light.

"About time," McCoy muttered, hoarse with relief. "Hang on, Jim -- we'll have that pressure down in a minute."

"No pressure. Good." Kirk nodded, serenely irrepressible, pleased with his own pun even as his head sank and his grip relaxed. "Pack up your troubles, gentlemen."

Spock, his night vision destroyed, ducked his head to avoid the glare, or perhaps to preserve the memory: and the starscape laughed the captain's eyes as McCoy retorted, "Starting with you."

-----


End file.
